American Experience

Historian Robert Dallek on America Following World War II

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ROBERT DALLEK: America in the late 1940s immediately after WWII, goes through a political, sort of political upheaval, political international upheaval. Coming out of World War II, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we'd have a kind of lovefest for as far into the future as anyone could see. China would be our ally, there wasn't going to be a Chinese civil war; the Big Four -- Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and China -- would work together to assure world peace, and work through the United Nations, the fulfillment of Woodrow Wilson's dream. The end product of World War II was that very quickly, we find ourselves locked in a confrontation with the Soviet Union over its attempt to control Eastern Europe, over questions in East Asia and the Middle East. A dividing world between east and west, which is embodied in '46 and '47 with Churchill's' famous Iron Curtain speech, with Truman Doctrine in March of '47, the Marshall Plan in June of '47, what you get is the beginnings of the Cold War.

In Hollywood, there is a struggle over this, because Hollywood during World War II had been a kind of propaganda machine, preaching the virtues of universalism, preaching ideas which conformed to what Americans wanted to hear about not only prosperity, but freedom, liberty, the promotion of democracy against a totalitarian systems. Now, the Soviet Union was our great ally in World War II. There were many people who were pained at the fact that we fell into this Cold War, and of course, Franklin Roosevelt's former vice president, Henry Wallace, is an advocate of the idea that Harry Truman and the conservative State Department in the United States are promoting this Cold War. They're the architects; they're the ones responsible for this Cold War with the Soviet Union. If only Franklin Roosevelt had lived, we would have avoided this confrontation. And so there's a division in Hollywood among people, as there is a division across the country. What is the reality? Is it that the Soviets are aggressive and expansionistic, that you can't trust the Communists, that they're intent upon world wide revolution, or is this a political blunder on the part of the Truman administration that they frightened, they scared the Soviets into being expansionistic in Eastern Europe. So that division is going on. Reagan comes down firmly on the side of the anti-communists, of those who are of a mind to believe that the Soviets did threaten us. But there is a division, and people become very; there's a lot of acrimony, and people are vindictive towards those who are on one side of the equation or the other.

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